Google Chrome

[LoPo]

Sweetest web browser.* It’s uber fast! Download now: http://www.google.com/chrome SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Google Chrome", url: "http://www.lopo.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome/" });

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[dudio]

Just reading reviews on it now.
I'm not thrilled with FF and was thinking
of going back to IE, but this lil app may be
the best answer !

[{OF}Flying_Dutchman]

Nothing wrong with FF! FF3 is my fav.

But what the hey, I will try this one out too

Not bad. Did a little test drive, and found to be a little buggy, but this is a beta after all. Some E-commerce sites will pop up a warning that you should use IE if you want your transaction to work right. On the same sites I can use FF with no warning issues.

[ChemicalWarrior]

It's clearly a beta browser at this point. Some of the features are a bit over hyped for what is really happening in the back ground. While every tab has its own process that doesn't always prevent multi-tab crashes and the reasoning with that is Flash and similar plugins are contained within a single process and can cause a cascading effect. It's not major and still a major improvement (and a must really for performance reasons) but still will pop up. WebKit (the render engine for Chrome) also has a few compatibility issues (non-standards related issues) with a few sites. The browser will also not mask itself as IE on IE-only sites (G-Man's issue). Overall though it's very good, and will hopefully knock more out of IE's marketshare and not hurt Firefox to bad.

To note Google is still funding the vast majority of Mozilla and will continue to (Google pays to be the default search engine in Firefox). Also, the real reason behind Chrome is to further Google's web apps. They're trying very hard to make the actual OS as unimportant as possible and hurt Microsoft. Not a replacement but instead you can now do nearly everything in a web app that you could (productivity wise) in the OS in stand alone applications. That's the reason for V8 (javascript VM in Chrome) and it's highly touted performance (which, in my opinion really isn't that impressive compared to say Tracemonkey which will be coming with FF 3.1).

[Soul]

Chem! wtf man, thought you went awol on us! When are you starting school?

[mimicvii]

Originally Posted by ChemicalWarrior

Some of the features are a bit over hyped for what is really happening in the back ground. While every tab has its own process that doesn't always prevent multi-tab crashes and the reasoning with that is Flash and similar plugins are contained within a single process and can cause a cascading effect.

While I cannot speak for other plugins, but if you pull up Chrome's task manager (shift+esc), you can see and kill the Flash plugin and not kill the tabs using it, their flash images are just replaced with sad faces.

On a related note, IE8 is really catching up with FF and even has most of the features of Chrome, although I imagine not quite as well implemented as Chrome's. IE8 does at least break each tab into its own process now although I like the way Chrome does it better....plus dragging tabs from accross multiple browser windows or just dragging a tab off the browser and having it spawn it's own is pretty nifty.

It is fast. I had a problem getting the Java plugin working. Found out I had to get java 6-10RC after some research, and after reboot, works fine now.

[{OF}Flying_Dutchman]

Me likes Chrome.

Fast, simple, still some bugs but most things work well.

[ChemicalWarrior]

Originally Posted by Soul

Chem! wtf man, thought you went awol on us! When are you starting school?

I'm alive, I promise. I'll be finishing my second week of college tomorrow actually, I'd call it my third though personally as "Opening" week doesn't count. I've been hyper busy though with that and related stuff. I'm going to Missouri University of Science and Technology and doing a double major in Information Science and Technology with Cognitive Psychology (this setup will hopefully fulfill me as I've changed from Comp Eng), so yeah I'm doing nerd crap constantly now. Oddly enough though I sold off my gaming computer as I don't have the time to game nor the space in the dorm room.

Originally Posted by mimicvii

While I cannot speak for other plugins, but if you pull up Chrome's task manager (shift+esc), you can see and kill the Flash plugin and not kill the tabs using it, their flash images are just replaced with sad faces.

On a related note, IE8 is really catching up with FF and even has most of the features of Chrome, although I imagine not quite as well implemented as Chrome's. IE8 does at least break each tab into its own process now although I like the way Chrome does it better....plus dragging tabs from accross multiple browser windows or just dragging a tab off the browser and having it spawn it's own is pretty nifty.

I think the flash issue is just odd behavior with regard to crashing it. Not sure what triggers it even as I haven't had Chrome crash, just heard this from multiple sources who have repeated it.

I haven't really messed to much with the IE8 beta to be honest. I think it's good for the market that so many worthwhile choices are out there now. Clearly Microsoft has been pressured into putting serious time and money into keeping IE up to date and even leading in a few areas. I think going forward, at least for the near future, the biggest difference between the browsers will be javascript performance.